Robust Skulls for Crab Crunching

Robust skulls for crab crunching, according to a report in New Scientist, 29 October 2005, p15. Robust Australopithecines are a group of extinct "hominids" that have large jaws, robust teeth with thick enamelled and large crests on their skulls that indicate they had powerful chewing muscles. Their scientific name is Paranthropus. It was believed these creatures "evolved their heavily enamelled bulbous teeth to chew tough tubers, fruits, seeds and nuts" but carbon isotopes studies of their teeth showed they were not strict vegetarians. Anthropologists wondered how their diet differed from those of other Australopithecines that lived alongside them but had less bulky skulls and teeth.

Alan Shabel of the University of California, Berkeley, analysed carbon isotopes in Paranthropus teeth and found they were similar to bones and teeth from animals that eat crabs and snails, such as the marsh mongoose and otter. Shabel commented that "thick teeth would have been essential for coping with the inevitable grit that would have contaminated any crab delicacy." According to New Scientist, "a taste for the crustaceans may explain the puzzling bulky skulls and molars of the robust Australopithecines that lived alongside early humans".

Editorial Comment: Large, thickly enamelled teeth set in strong robust jaws might be useful for crunching crustaceans, but that does not explain how the teeth, bones and muscles came about. Finding a function for some feature, or explaining why it is useful feature to have, does not explain its origin. Until the evolutionists can explain how trying to bite a crab with small teeth and jaws changes the genes for teeth, bone and muscle growth they have not explained anything. What they have found is evidence that animals that already had a powerful chewing apparatus can use it to eat things that other animals would have difficulty eating. This fits with Genesis, which tells us the animals were created to eat plants in the original good world. Robust Australopithecines would have eaten tubers, seeds, nuts but after Noah's flood these became less abundant, so the Australopithecines took to eating anything else they could. Because they already had big teeth and strong jaws they were able to exploit a food source that other animals could not. (Ref. diet, degeneration, explanation)